It's been a long road for Highway 46 fixers
| Saturday, Nov 07 2009 12:00 PM
Last Updated Saturday, Nov 07 2009 12:00 PM
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HOW DANGEROUS IS 46?
California Highway Patrol officials say Highway 46 is not a dangerous road -- it just has impatient, unsafe drivers.
Highway 46 death and injury statistics are below the state average for similar routes, said Caltrans District Six Director Brian Everson.
But the route's reputation as a "Blood Alley," sparked by actor James Dean's death on the road in 1955, was cemented locally in 1999 when a crash severely injured four members of the Waski family of Bakersfield and killed Bakersfield resident Michelle Phillips.
More people died on other two-lane roads in Kern County that year.
But the injuries of the Chevron manager, his stay-at-home wife and their two Boy Scout sons sparked community outrage about the safety of the route to the Paso Robles wine region and the beaches of the Central California coast.
And a review of fatal traffic accidents on Kern County roads over the past six years shows that the route remains one of the most dangerous routes here.
Since January 2004 there have been 453 crashes on Highway 46 in Kern County. At least one person died in 20 of those impacts -- putting Highway 46 into a first-place tie with Highway 223 for the highest ratio of accidents with fatalities in Kern County.
The deaths often hit in waves.
Eight of the 20 accidents on Highway 46 in the past six years happened in a single year -- 2006. Thirteen people died that year.
There were no fatal accidents on the road in 2008.
In the last week of October, there were two horrible collisions that claimed seven lives.
Both crashes were triggered by drivers who tried to pass slower traffic and ran out of room between themselves and and oncoming vehicles.
NUMBER OF CRASHES INVOLVING FATALITIES
January 2004 to November 2009
Highway 46: 453 crashes, 20 fatal crashes
Highway 119: 636 crashes, 16 fatal crashes
Highway 223: 271 crashes, 12 fatal crashes
Highway 178: 456 crashes, 11 fatal crashes
Highway 184: 870 crashes, nine fatal crashes
Highway 43: 335 crashes, eight fatal crashes
Highway 65: 298 crashes, five fatal crashes
Source: California Highway Patrol
WORK GETTING UNDER WAY
The Highway 46 widening project is being done in segments. The order of those segments largely was decided by which could be done easiest. Here's the current timeline:
Segment 1: A ground breaking ceremony will be held 11 a.m. Tuesday at the Lost Hills Park, 14688 Lost Hills Road. Construction is scheduled to begin the week of Nov. 16 and be completed in mid-2012.
Griffith Company was awarded a $25 million contract to widen the eight miles from Brown Material Road to 1.9 miles west of Highway 33. Existing intersections will be upgraded to accommodate truck traffic. The intersection with Highway 33 will be signalized and realigned.
Segment 2: Kecks Road to the San Luis Obispo County line. Construction's scheduled to start July 2010.
Segment 3: Just west of Highway 33 to Kecks Road. Scheduled to start construction September 2010.
Segment 4: Just east of the West Side Canal to Brown Material Road. Not fully funded yet.
Source: Caltrans
PROJECT SOURCES OF FUNDING
Segments 1, 2 and 3
SAFETEA-LU - $84.54 million
* Federal earmark money secured in a national transportation bill by former Congressman Bill Thomas in 2005.
State transportation dollars -- $49.05 million
* A mix of state and federal money routinely handed out every two years.
Proposition 1B -- $45 million
* Money from a state bond measure passed in 2006 and awarded by the California Transportation Commission.
KernCOG transportation dollars -- $32.23 million
* Routine state and federal road money controlled by the Kern Council of Governments.
Traffic Congestion Relief Program - $7.57 million (only $5.2 million funded)
* Legislation passed in 2000 that would have brought $30 million to Highway 46 but was slowed by the collapse of the tech stock market.
Source: Caltrans
Pulling together funding for the widening of Highway 46 has been a decade-long exercise in tedium.
So next week's groundbreaking on the first phase of the project is a victory for an eclectic group of people who have fought -- sometimes with each other -- to add two more lanes to one of Kern County's most dangerous two-lane roads.
The Kern Council of Governments and Caltrans pieced together the $216.38 million that will widen the route from the San Luis Obispo County line to Brown Material Road near Lost Hills.
"We're elated here at the office," said KernCOG Executive Director Ron Brummett. "For more than 15 years we've been pushing on this corridor."
FIX 46
One of the most interesting characters in the Highway 46 drama has been state Sen. Dean Florez, D-Shafter who, as a freshman Assemblyman, seized on community outrage over a high-profile accident on the route in 1999 to launch a campaign to improve Highway 46.
His efforts were largely frustrated by politics and brutal economic reality. But Florez's talent for publicity kept the route's repair at the top of people's minds.
And when state and federal transportation windfalls blew into Kern, Highway 46 was able to capture the cash with the help of people like then-Rep. Bill Thomas, R-Bakersfield.
"SCOTCH-TAPED TOGETHER"
The largest single source of money -- $84.5 million so far -- came from federal road funding legislation passed in 2005.
Thomas brought the cash home along with the $630 million he rounded up for freeway connections in Bakersfield.
State and federal money controlled by the California Transportation Commission and KernCOG -- and a major chunk of cash from a 2006 bond measure -- brought in the bulk of the rest.
An extra pot of money from 2000 legislation carried by then-Assemblyman Florez helped grease the wheels of government for the project, said Caltrans officials.
The bill was supposed to deliver $30 million to Highway 46 but it fizzled in the recession caused by the stock market crash in the early part of this decade.
Caltrans project manager Mehran Akhavan said only $5 million of that money has actually materialized. But, Akhavan said, having the money allocated on paper allowed Caltrans to match federal funds and move the project along.
"The $30 million commitment alone was enough to get the feds to release the money," Florez said.
FLOREZ
Following a high-profile crash in 1999, Florez made himself the loudest voice on the Highway 46 issue.
Florez and state Sen. Roy Ashburn, R-Bakersfield, tried -- unsuccessfully -- to short-cut the slow grind of the environmental clearance process with legislation. They had to settle for a bill that created a report on possible short-term, low-cost safety measures for the route.
Florez went further on his own.
He launched the "Fix 46" campaign and pressured KernCOG to immediately shift $60 million from the Westside Parkway in Bakersfield to Highway 46.
Florez got heavy resistance and eventually dropped his plan, backing instead a compromise by Shafter City Manager John Guinn that would move an extra $10 million of local money to Highway 46 -- for a total KernCOG commitment of $45 million -- when the route was ready to move forward.
It has been a decade since Florez won that concession from KernCOG.
THOMAS MONEY
But that increased focus on Highway 46, said KernCOG's Brummett, made it one of only three projects KernCOG continued to fund through the bad financial times that followed the tech stock crash.
So the project was still alive to take advantage of the massive federal cash windfall in 2005.
"One of the key factors here at the later stages was the $92 million that Bill Thomas brought," Brummett said. "That was very critical."
The money was spread across all three of the first phases of the road widening and, Brummett said, ensured the second and third phases of the project would be built immediately following the first one.
Without the Thomas cash, he said, KernCOG would have likely been forced to wait four to eight more years to collect enough local transportation money to build those segments of the route.
TWO LANE SOLUTION
And those sections of road are critical to reducing accidents on the western portion of Highway 46 -- the segment with the most fatal accidents.
Caltrans District Six Director Brian Everson said widening the route to four lanes -- with a generous median strip between the two directions of traffic -- will solve both the Kern community's safety concerns and speed the flow of traffic.
The speed limit could increase from 55 mph to 65 mph, he said.
"Putting in a four-lane expressway is certainly a safer facility," Everson said.
